Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

We frequently work with a local company to get interview recordings transcribed. We use transcripts of our stakeholder and user interviews as inputs into our design process. They help us to identify patterns from those we talk to which utlimately inform our stakeholder requirements and user needs and personae. Sometimes transcription works better than others.  Here are some tips:

• A transcript filled with "[inaudible]" notations is not helpful! Test your recorder and make sure you position it in the room appropriately to pick up all voices. (Consider background noise like loud A/C units since they may impact what gets picked up)
• Ask people to speak up if you think the tape may be missing their voice because of low volume.
• Consider giving the transcriber some assistance when you have frequently used jargon or internal terms. (We had a series of interviews on intranets and internets and the transcriber didn't know to pick up on the differences.)
• Voice the interviewer and interviewee names into the recorder before the session. This will help the transcriber track who's saying what. It also can be helpful if you have more than one interviewer and interviewee. (The typical male and female indicators in transcriptions can be very confusing when multiple people are involved.)
• If you are doing lots of interviews, identify the transcript and audio files by interviewee name instead of interview date. Sessions get cancelled and all those numbers make it difficult when trying to sort back through all of the results. 

If you've got tips, we'd love to hear them.

Ideally, this is first in a series of tips for UXD practitioners. Today's topic: interviewing.

We recently had a lot of stakeholder interviews to complete for a client in a short period of time. Think 65 interviews in a little over 3 weeks. Our interviews were more about buyin and garnering political support than stakeholder requirements, but nonetheless they had to be completed. We took a divide-and-conquer approach. This meant we had first time interviewers conducting interviews. Below are a few tips we created for the team:

• Avoid asking leading questions
• Ask people about recent behavior instead of predicting their actions: people are bad predictors.
• Avoid an inquisition: rather, aim for an organic and natural conversation
• Avoid jumping to solutions or feature ideas
• Listen! Listen! Listen!
• Restate answers to make sure you have understanding
• Ask for clarification of terms or items that you are not familiar with
• If you are not getting clear responses, PROBE!
• Avoid making judgments and assumptions
• Ask questions you think you already know the answer to: answers will surprise you.
• Do domain research before interviews to avoid getting up to speed on the subject matter during an interview.
• Listen for the words they use.
• Avoid getting a list of likes and dislikes. Ask why individuals have their preferences?
• Solicit stories thru "tell me about..." prompts.

Stay tuned for UXD Tip #2 - Transcription Advice